Month: July 2016

So instead of doing game related Saturday articles or just straight up moaning about politics, let’s all join hand in hand with something that everyone can enjoy, apart from if you’re deaf, in which case I’m very sorry. Of course I’m talking about music! I love a bit of music, I’m listening to some right now as I type these words. I’m just going to share with you some of my favourite songs, that way you can judge my personality and call me a tit when you see some of the songs that are on here.

Ah shit, this was last minute. I was writing up the Sherlock Holmes Achievement guides but I still haven’t finished either of them, so I’ll be working my way through some cheap sports games, this one is a really easy completion so the sooner we get it over with the better.

Now for those of you who have ever seen Scrubs, you may be wondering what happened to the walking idiot that was John Dorian, or J.D. for short. Well, let’s find out shall we and watch his latest movie (that was funded through Kickstarter), Wish I Was Here.

Now I’m not going to lie to you, Achievement Hunting is fun. But at times it can get a little bit unfun and you may feel disheartened or just not up for it. That’s fine, it’s happened to me before. If this ever happens to me or it starts to feel like I’m not playing for fun anymore, I try and make myself stop. More often than not that works, however recently I haven’t been able to stop and it’s thanks to the Bean Dive that I was, but enough of that.

A lot of games take some time to complete, especially movie tie in games as it requires you to either collect a lot of things or upgrade everything to maximum capacity. Believe me, it gets boring very fast, but it’s something that needs to be done. Well, it doesn’t need to be done, it’s just something you have to do for gamerscore.

Some games don’t make you do this, some games just make you play through the game and then you’re done. CSI gives you 200G per case and there’s only five cases in the game, so that’s some very easy gamerscore. But when you’re playing for hours on end and playing these terrible games it can get boring. Just remember to take a break sometime and play something you want to.

If you’re sat playing nothing but bad games all day you’ll get sick of it very quickly, so you need to break up the monotony of those games and play something that’s fairly enjoyable. You’ve played Turning Point: Fall of Liberty all day? Well play Skyrim for a bit. You need to have breaks from the bad otherwise you’ll get extremely sick and tired of playing terrible games and eventually give up. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, you have as long as it takes to gain gamerscore.

Hell, I took a couple weeks off from gamerscore hunting and didn’t really play anything at all, I just did writing. But now I’m back to achievement hunting and it’s a lot fresher now that I’ve had a break. It also helps to play good games for achievements too, because if you aren’t having fun boosting up your gamerscore, then you can have fun playing a good game and at the same time make a small boost in your gamerscore.

The WWE games are a prime example of this. If you like the WWE franchise in any way, whether watching it, playing the games or both then the older WWE games are really good and offer gamerscore. Even the newer ones offer easy gamerscore and are pretty good, but not as good as the older ones in my opinion. WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 is the game I’ve been working on completing, however you have to beat everyone on the roster on Legendary and Hard. The achievements don’t stack, so I have to beat all 67 of them, twice. But it’s fun in a way because the game itself is fun, so it’s not that bad.

If you feel like you aren’t having fun then stop, there’s no point in doing something when you aren’t having fun.

Also, there isn’t a part seven. This is it. I have no more to really say other than have fun, don’t play to the point of exhaustion and keep in mind that you’ll never get the world record.

So yesterday we took a look at the games you should avoid, and today I’ll be giving a few examples of the games that you should definitely play for gamerscore.

Movie Tie-In Games

Believe me, movie tie in games are easy gamerscore, but by no means are they good games. Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Cars and CSI: Hard Evidence seem to be the only movie tie in games I’ve completed currently but I’m working my way through Happy Feet Two and Star Trek currently, even though Star Trek doesn’t seem to be an easy completion. Anyway, there’s a lot of easy games that are movie tie ins.

Most of the time, movie or TV Show tie in games offer up an extremely easy 1000G, of course it does mean you’ll be playing some utterly terrible games.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

I’m not going to be talking about specific games other than this game because it deserves notable credibility for being an easy completion, a fun completion and on top of that it’s one of the greatest shooters I’ve ever played. Wolfenstein: The New Order gives you a very nice variety of pretty much every achievement there is, the regular mission completion, the perks system, collectables and difficulty. I definitely recommend picking this game up when you can because it truly is a phenomenal game.

ID@Xbox

For those of you with Xbox One’s you’ll definitely want to take advantage of the ID@Xbox programme, I touched on this topic briefly in the last few parts however this article will go into much more depth. Basically with the ID@Xbox programme, a lot of indie games are being released, for example Rocket League. With this comes a hell of a lot of easy gamerscore and each one has 1000G on offer. Considering the games are cheaper than most retail Xbox One games, ranging from about £5 – £12, you’ll definitely want to pick up some of the easier completions, such as Factotum 90 and The Goosebumps Game.

Telltale Games

Tales from the Borderlands, Back to the Future, Game of Thrones: Iron from Ice, The Wolf Among Us, literally anything Telltale releases is an enjoyable and easy 1000G. I recommend you go and pick up the games I just listed there now.

2006

2006? What do you mean? Well, it’s very simple. The majority of games that came out in 2006 had very simple achievements, most specifically, sports games. NHL and NBA 2K6 are renowned for being very easy and you can actually get all 1000G in one game if done right.

So while pretty much all games have some achievements in them, some of them just aren’t worth the effort and are ultimately are just way too time consuming, so I thought I’d mention a few games, well, types of games that you should avoid at all costs.

Guitar Hero/Rockband Games

Pretty much every one of the Guitar Hero or Rockband games, including the latest releases, will have one or more achievements that are just impossible to get. More than likely, the servers have been shut down, making multiplayer achievements pretty difficult to gain.

Also, unless you’re extremely good at Guitar Hero (like me), you’ll have trouble gaining most of the achievements as all of them have difficulty related achievements, or ones for hitting every note in difficult songs.

Perfect Dark Zero

This game is no good whatsoever for achievements. You get 15G for completing the entire game. And there’s also an achievement for playing 1000 online games. It really isn’t worth it because of how long it takes to get even one achievement. On top of that, it’s just not a very good game either, you can get it with the Rare Replay, I got the special edition for £2.

Old Fifa Games

The older world cup games are excellent for gamerscore. However, most of the regular series, so Fifa 07 and so on, have online achievements that you can no longer gain. EA Shuts their servers off every two years on their old games, pretty much all sport games do so if you plan on trying to complete a Fifa game then do it before the next one comes out.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour

Pretty sure the only game in the world that has all the achievements locked because the online went off and took the achievements with it. All of the games have very difficult achievements and straight up achievements that you can’t get, just don’t even bother with this series.

Any Xbox 360 Arcade Game Over 10 Hours

Games like Sonic the Fighters and Harms Way are easy arcade games with a good 200G to pick up very quickly. But it’s only 200G. Some full retail 1000G games take a lot less time than a 200G arcade game, so it’s best not too spend too much time on an arcade game on the Xbox 360 because you could be completing some terrible movie tie in game.

That pretty much wraps it up. Before you start a game I recommend you check its TA Ratio on TrueAchievements. Usually a game with more than 2,000TA is a difficult completion, and anything below 1,700TA is very easy.

There’s a number of ways to hunt achievements. You may find some are more efficient than others. Whatever you choose, as long as you’re gaining achievements then it’s working. I’m going to run you through some of the methods I use for achievement hunting, you can give them a go and see which one works best for you

Bean Dive

The Bean Dive is something I haven’t shut up about for quite some time now and it’s something that you can do any time on TrueAchievements. Now what it does is allows you a way to keep track of your backlog and get through the games that you probably wouldn’t if it wasn’t for the Dive.

Primarily, you’re supposed to get one achievement in every game you have no achievements in to bring down your completion percentage and use that as an incentive to earn more achievements, to increase your percentage. It was useful for me because I started playing games that if it wasn’t for the Bean Dive, I wouldn’t have started or finished.

Easy Achievements

Another thing on TrueAchievements is the “Easy Achievements” tab. It’s self explanatory, it gives you a list of every game you’ve played and all the achievements and ranks each individual achievement in order of the easiest to the most difficult. It’s extremely handy if you want to rack up some really easy gamerscore and I’ve not had the chance to use it but it seems like a very good way to gain some gamerscore.

That image above probably explains it better than I can, it’ll show you the game, the value of the achievement and it’s ratio, which is basically how easy it is to achieve.

Completionists

I don’t know if I’m a completionist or not to be honest. If a game is easy to complete then I will at some point complete it. I don’t usually go out of my way to get the grindy achievements though, however I’ve started to do that. For example my time with Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 is almost over, all I have to do now is complete all the challenges and smack up the entire roster, twice.

Completing games does look good. I mean, I completed Wolfenstein: The New Order. Twice. There are many games that are very easy to complete, mainly movie tie in games. Some games are impossible to complete due to broken achievements or inactive servers. In some cases, achievements in games take time to unlock or are a challenge, it’s completely up to you if you want to go complete games, more often than not I do, if I’m playing a game solely for achievements then I’ll complete it. It looks good to have a full 1000G in a game and then I can brag to all the people that care, which is nobody.

ID@Xbox

This is fairly new. ID@Xbox is the new way that indie games can get onto the Xbox One market. The ID@Xbox games offer easy, 1000G and more often than not the games are extremely short. Examples include Factotum 90, Cubot and Level 22. If you have an Xbox One then I highly suggest you sink some money into the ID@Xbox games, there’s no reason not to and it’s a very easy way to pick up an easy 1000G in no time at all.

Movie Tie Ins

Along with genuinely good indie games, you can play genuinely bad movie tie ins. There are one or two movie tie in games that aren’t too good for achievements, an example of this being 007: Quantum of Solace, but that’s primarily because of the online achievements. As for a lot of children type movies like Cars, Toy Story 3, Happy Feet Two and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, they all offer up an easy 1000G.

No matter what game you play, you probably wont enjoy it if you go for the completion. But when you do eventually complete a game it’s so satisfying.